Random musings and thoughts on SharePoint, Business Intelligence, Microsoft technology, and occasionally even diving from John White

Increase your OneDrive Storage Limit beyond 5 TB

Published March 31, 2020

Last updated on April 1, 2020

OneDrive for Business offers “unlimited” storage. You would be excused if you were sure that the limit was 1 TB because that is what it is set to by default, Microsoft would prefer it if you didn’t exercise this particular option. Individual users can’t change their limits, and administrators can only up that limit to 5 TB. Increasing it beyond that limit requires extra steps. I have just gone through those steps for my own OneDrive for business, and thought that I would share the experience.

The number 5,242,880‬ (5 TB) used for the storage quota must be precise.

The default value for the tenant itself can be changed as well, so that this first step isn’t necessary for new users. See Set the default storage space for OneDrive users for details. It should be noted that the maximum value that you can set as a default is 5120 (5TB). If it’s set any higher, it won’t be saved.

Increasing storage limit to 25 TB

Before you can set the limit any higher, you must first fill the OneDrive to 90% of its capacity, or 4.5 TB. This happened to me a few weeks ago and I started getting weekly “approaching your capacity” messages. At this point I opened a support ticket, and this is where the fun started.

I’ll spare you the back and forth email exchange, but a little snippet of the conversation went something like the following. Each line is an action or an email:

Me: fills out form explicitly stating that I have hit 90% and need quota increased from 5 TB to 25 TBSupport: Please reply with a screenshot of the problem, and any troubleshooting stepsMe: I need my OneDrive quota increased from 5 to 25 TBSupport: You need OneDrive Plan 2 for that, and your OneDrive must be at 98% (both incorrect)Me: I have E5, which includes unlimited storage (I ignored the 98% comment)Support: What capacity is it at now?Me: 91%Support: Send the OneDrive URLMe: sends OneDrive URLSupport: Your tenant may not have the Boost storage option enabled. Let me ask my supervisor to get that enabled.Support (one day later): Would you like instructions?Me: Yes pleaseSupport: sends publicly available url listed above that increases quota with Powershell Support: First change it to 10 TB, then change it to 25 TB (no idea where that came from)Me: tries it, doesn't work for 10 or 25Me: It didn't workSupport: Did you connect to the SharePoint Online module first? (seriously)Me: Yes. This isn't my first rodeo. (I'm paraphrasing)Support: Can you send a screenshot of your error message? Me: There is no error message, the value simply does not save. Me: This approach works up to 5 TB but not beyond Support: Let me look further into this and get back to you. Support: Your request had now been passed to our escalations team Support (5 days later, different rep): We enabled boost storage. Can you try and let us know? Me: Successful. Thank you.

I include the above partly because you might want the chuckle, but mostly to let you know not to give up in this. It’s advertised, and you paid for it.

The command that I used to enable this, once support had turned on the boost storage feature was:

Set-SPOSite -Identity <user's OneDrive URL> -StorageQuota 26214400

The number 26,214,400 (25 TB) must be used precisely.

In any event, after running the above command, my storage limit is now at 25 TB.

The particularly interesting thing to note here is that because the “Boost storage” feature is set at the tenant level, any other OneDrives in the tenant can have their limits increased without contacting support. All that is necessary is the PowerShell script above. However, the drive must still reach 90% capacity before it can be increased.